Mists of Grianan
An open-world, multiplayer Action RPG set on a mist-shrouded isle, rebuilt in Unreal Engine 5 from its origins as a 3-year Minecraft world.
Project Details
Mists of Grianan is the project I keep returning to because it started as a place before it was ever a game. The first version was a large-scale MMORPG multiplayer server in Minecraft, built over three years beginning in 2012 with a close friend and a small team of builders we met through the SAO Recreation community (Sword Art Online in Minecraft). We made everything the hard way, not with plugins or external tools, but with blocks, redstone, command blocks, and sheer iteration: cities and towns, dungeons and events, questlines and stories, custom NPC logic, weapons, music, and lore embedded into the terrain like you would hide secrets in a real world.
That Minecraft era is still the emotional core of Grianan. It taught me what I actually care about in RPGs: exploration that feels earned, spaces that reward attention, and the kind of shared authorship you only get when a world is built socially. It also taught me the ceiling of the medium. Minecraft is an incredible canvas for layout, scale, and collaboration, and it is a frustrating final format for lighting, combat readability, cinematic atmosphere, and the kind of systems that make an Action RPG feel native rather than simulated.
The World, Imported
The current Unreal build starts with something honest: importing the Minecraft world as-is, before any smoothing, substitution, or art direction. Seeing it in-engine is always a reminder that the world already exists. The work is not inventing it from scratch. The work is translating it into a medium where it can finally breathe.
Evolution Beyond Minecraft
After the server, we tried to evolve Grianan into other forms, first as a 2D game in Godot, then as a 3D version in Unity. Both attempts were valuable, but they ran into the same wall: the Minecraft world represented multiple years of accumulated work, and rebuilding that scope by hand in a conventional engine pipeline is a slow, brutal kind of amnesia. You are not making the game, you are re-making the same world again from scratch, and the project collapses under the weight of its own history.
Why Minecraft to 3D Exists
That frustration is directly what led to my other project, Minecraft to 3D. I wanted a way to treat our Minecraft server like source material, a meaningful authored scene, instead of a locked pile of cubes. The idea was not to export geometry. The idea was to preserve intent. Keep the layout, preserve object placement and orientation, rebuild terrain into a continuous surface that lights correctly, and substitute recognizable structures with higher-quality assets so the world can live comfortably inside modern tools.
Applying the Bridge to Grianan
Once Minecraft to 3D worked on generic scenes, the real goal was always Grianan. This is where the pipeline stops being a technical demo and becomes a creative unlock. The Minecraft world stops being trapped in voxel form and becomes an editable foundation inside a modern engine. From there, I can iterate forward: atmosphere, combat readability, progression, multiplayer systems, and all the details that Minecraft could only ever imply.
Discussion
The current version of Mists of Grianan is an Unreal Engine 5 build that uses Minecraft to 3D as the foundation, then iterates forward from there. I use AI where it genuinely helps, accelerating the time-consuming reconstruction and asset overhead, because the point of this project is not to spend months detailing every single mesh. The point is to make the world playable in its right medium: a place with atmosphere, combat, progression, and multiplayer systems that can actually scale to the story and scope we originally built toward.
More than anything, Mists of Grianan is a labor of love shaped by time. It has been interrupted, reshaped, and rebooted across engines, not because the idea changed, but because the path to realizing it kept changing. The through-line has stayed constant: take a world that was born in Minecraft’s social creativity, and finally let it become the RPG it always wanted to be.
Special Thanks
To my close friend Mark Siminski and the original builder team from the Minecraft era, and to the SAO Recreation community for being the place where those collaborations began. Thank you to everyone who helped shape the world by building, playtesting, writing lore, tuning encounters, or simply caring enough to treat it like a real place.